Tadpoles

Early in march we found a large quantity of frogspawn in some natural ponds beside the Torridge. Most of the frogspawn was in a large pond, but some was in a smaller pond beside it, and with the dryer weather the pond was slowly disappearing.

We checked the frogspawn over the next fortnight, and eventually we decided that the water had gotten to low, so we took a bucket and scooped the frogspawn out of the little pond and transferred it to the bigger pond.

We kept the last little bit in the bucket and brought it home to watch it hatch.

The frogspawn was checked every day and to be fair, we got a lot of miles out of that spawn! We looked up the process in various books, investigated what tadpoles eat, drew various pictures of the tadpoles, as well as detailed diagrams of the life cycle of frogs.

But, all good things must come to an end, so eventually the tadpoles ( frogpole actually now mummy) had to be taken back to the big pond.

We carried them down in their bucket and very carefully poured them into the big pond. By then the smaller pond had disappeared entirely so we were very pleased we had intervened. I think I was expecting to see loads of tadpoles in the big pond, but the bottom was covered with leaves and you couldn't see a thing. Once our tadpoles were in they too blended into the leafy bottom and were gone.